If I had a nickel for every time someone told me, "I don't have a backup."

I am just going to go on a generalized rant... and then return to next steps.

This is probably not the appropriate time, given your state of mind is not likely accepting this sort of advice at this point in time, to remind you that mirrors and backups serve two different purposes and are not equivalent things. This is a difficult lesson for some to learn. You are one of the some.

I am not trying to be a dick (it happens naturally), but if you cant afford to backup terabytes of data, then you cant afford to have terabytes of data. Consider a strategy where you backup things important to you and gamble on the rest. I use cheap SATA disks at home too. I use big ass 6TB WD drives that I dont trust. Because I dont trust them they are in 3-way mirrors. I also have a backup pool that I back them up too. This is just good stewardship of data you want to keep.

People who buy giant ass disks and then complain about how long it takes to resilver a giant ass disk are out of their minds. They remind me of morons that buy houses next airports and then complain about the noise of airplanes.

I have no idea what happened to your system for you to loose three disks simultaneously. There is about a one in a ten billion chance of that happening on the same day unless your controller card or cables are bad, you lost your cmos settings and then compounded it by doing something stupid. I just dont see you recovering from this scenario where you have two bad drives trying to resilver from each other.


WWJD - what would Jason do?

Here is what I would do, if this were my system. You should see if anyone else has a better idea.

If you are at all concerned about losing data first use dd to backup your messed up zfs disks to new drives. use the new drives in the system and perform the following operations. If you are willing to wing it like me you can skip the backup. Be advised, the system is in this mess because you skipped the back up :-) Ironic, right?

One likely has access to some of the files as the pool is marked DEGRADED and not FAILED for reasons I dont understand.
- zpool status -v data
-- the files listed from the output of this command are toast. they are bogging the system down. if it were my data, i would delete them. say what? yes delete them. The system cant recover them, they cant be snapshot'd, they are just in your way. For purposes of recovering files on the live filesystem you dont need to delete existing corrupted snapshots. If you dont want to delete these corrupted files, then you need to find a way to exclude them from your backup process (rsync --exclude=)

-- the surviving files are going to have to be copied to new target media. once the corrupted files are deleted standard file tools like tar and cpio can be used to copy to the new target smoothly. It might be possible to get snapshot/send/recv working again by deleting all the snapshots with corrupted blocks so that the zpool is clean of corruption. Be advised, there maybe something on one of those snapshots you may want to keep.

- i was going to stay stop the resilver, but that might detach the mirrors and that could be a bad thing(tm). Instead, you might want to consider tuning the resilver so it goes really slow (in terms of I/O per second), obviously it is going slowly in Mb/s :-)

that's what I would do. Your level of comfort and skill level should should be governing factors. You may wish to seek professional help.

That's what I would do. Your mileage may vary.

j.


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